Security Onion - Free Platform for Network Security
Security Onion is a free Linux-based distro used for network security. It is built on top of the Xubuntu Long-term Support (LTS) distro. It is mainly used for log management and threat hunting. Many open-source tools such as Suricata (Intrusion Detection System, IDS), Snort (Open Source Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)), etc are bundled with Security Onion. This blog provides you with a brief introduction to Security Onion covering download, installation, tools available in OS, etc.
Download and Installation
You can download Security Onion by using the below link:
After downloading, you can install the operating system on a virtual machine. If you are a new user, select Evaluation Mode which enables most things automatically.
Security Onion Platform
| Analyst Tools Hunt, Kibana, TheHive, Navigator, Playbook, Fleet, Cyberchef |
| Network & Host Data Strelka, Beats, Steno, Zeek, Wazuh, Osquery, Suricata |
| Infrastructure Docker, Salt, Grafana, Logstash, Filebeat, Redis, ElasticSearch |
| Operating System CentOS, Ubuntu |
How can we use Security Onion to secure Infrastructure?
Security Onion can be deployed with firewalls, servers, and other IT devices. Later, it is configured to consume logs and provide alerts in case of any suspicious activity.
Tools Available in Security Onion
There are many open-source tools available in the operating system that helps to detect and mitigate network attacks.
- Security Onion Console - When you login into the operating system, this is the first thing you encountered. As the name suggests, it provides a console interface to manage and also provides alerts from different tools such as Suricata, Wazuh, Hunt, Zeek etc.
- Kibana - Tool created by Elastic, used to analyze different types of logs and alerts generated by different open-source tools.
- CyberChef - Analysis tool used to analyze, and decode data for advanced analysis of data
- Playbook - Web application helps in creating a security detection strategy
- TheHive - Case Management Interface provides logs from Hunt, Kibana etc.
Conclusion
Security Onion is a versatile Linux-based distro that can be deployed in different architectures. It provides a single solution for full packet capture, threat hunting, log analysis, metadata analysis, etc. This helps administrators to manage security issues in a network in an easy way.
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Disclaimer: This tutorial is for educational purpose only. Individual is solely responsible for any illegal act.
